Tim St.Clair (frumbert)

I'm a web coder living in Coffs Harbour, NSW, Australia. I started using email & telnet in 1989, the web in 1992 on the NCSA Mosiac web browser, and coding HTML in 1995. After that I got into Director, Flash, Javascript, and various other bits and bobs. You can nose about in my old sites using the Wayback Machine (more, even more). I currently write javascript web apps, do custom moodle programming, and some web design (and make Minecraft mods!) - mostly I code.

I also have created an internal webapp for rapid content authoring for Avide / CourseSuite that significantly cost-reduces the content authoring process. What used take 6 weeks now takes about 2 days. It's better.

Janison

I worked for over a decade at a Coffs Harbour company known as Janison, who produced [then] an e-learning management and authoring tool (LMS) known as Toolbox (later called Janison LMS). I was a graphic artist, ux designer, a front- and back-end coder, a manager, a program manager, a stream manager, a helpdesk guy, a DBA, an analyst, marketer, office design stylist, and general all-things-doer. I had many hats, often in a day, as you do when there's 20-odd programmers all asking for your input... Janison have since [apparently] moved out of the LMS space, meanwhile adding a bunch of staff and a bunch more middle managers. I parted ways as their company direction changed, preferring to work in smaller organisations. Less stress, less politics, more family time.

McDonagh Computers

In the late 1990's, I was a computer repair technician working for a Tamworth based organisation that sold and repaired computers. I started as the single technician in a 4 person business, and helped build it up to a 20+ staff organisation across 3 towns in the region. My skills in particular were dealing with on-site repair (out of town, often on mining sites, factories, depots, or other small businesses) without access to many spare parts, and thus I learned to improvise fixes and always left a site with a workaround where a final solution was not possible. I worked with AS400 systems, Windows NT networks, Novell Netware LAN's, Windows 3.11 networks, and even the crazy phone-cable jigs that Apple had before Ethernet solved everything. I fixed telephones, soldered power supplies for dead Amigas and Apple II's, degaussed monitors, electrocuted myself frequently, fixed laptops, recovered deleted files, drove drunken staff home, prepared coffee, pulled all-nighters: if there's a tech job, I've probably done it. I left the company to work on the early days of dynamic web pages.

Computer Graphics College, the

Sydney, 1996. The dawn of the term "Multimedia", when CD's were called CDROM's and came in caddy's. I taught basic 3D (then using Infini-D and Lightwave) and some Macromedia Director coding to a bunch of graphic designers (these guys don't know code, and seemed to like it that way). The college also taught desktop publishing (Quark Xpress) and video production (Adobe Premiere), and I helped out in these classes when technical questions came up. I also managed the physical network, including the nightmare of integrating their many Mac Quadras and LC's with various Windows PC's on the network - getting them all to print, and to share files and so on. I'm so glad Windows so easily integrates these days. No, seriously, surely it does, right? Right?

Code snippets for web programmers

Music

I used to write a lot of computer music. Some of it is good, a lot of it is average to bad. Some of it is still on my BBC Micro, which is currently waiting for me to resolder its long-dry joints, if the 5.25" floppies don't rust first; some of them I never converted from various Tracker formats to anything remotely modern; some of it is on Atari ST floppies in Notator format - and it's highly unlikely I'll find a working one of those ever again. Here's links to all I currently have left on file.

2015 update: I found another track! it's a 42 minute recording called "stupidly large wave file.m4a". It's weird. I must have been drunk at the time it was made.

Creative writing

I used do a lot of creative writing. Much of this was done more than 25 years ago. Like the music, some of it is good, some bad. Linked to everything I could find - apologies for the web-unfriendly formats. I've linked these through Google Viewer, so you should be able to read them online.

Game ideas

They were notes and ideas when I was entertaining the idea of joining a MMORPG programming group (back in my TrueVision3D days). The principal game idea was that the game would be based on crafting and exploration of world and story, rather than monster battles. Never got off the ground significantly, but I still think the idea is workable, for a different gamer market than you normally associate with massively multiplayer games.